The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a massive change in economics and intellectual culture, centered on Europe, but rapidly affecting the entire world.
A significant part of that massive change was the fact that it was centered on Europe, a point that I thought was well made by Donald Herreld in his Great Courses lectures on economic history. At no time in prior world history had Europe come to stand in such a position of dominance. By the end of the period, the European states--fractured and warring states, in no way unified in their goals--were unquestionably the military and scientific rulers of the planet. It had never been that way before. In prior centuries, India, China, the Muslim states, or pre-Muslim Persia and Egypt had been peers or obvious superiors to any European state, even unified Rome.
The effects of this on Christian thought should not be understated. In the early centuries, Christian thinkers were continuously occupied with apologetics, the laying out of arguments for the intellectual credibility of Christianity as opposed to the other philosophical traditions at large in the Mediterranean and wider world. Even after Constantine, pagan thought gave ground only slowly. Persian thought remained non-Christian, and Persia remained a political and intellectual rival to Rome, all the way up to the Muslim explosion of the seventh century.
In the medieval era, Christians were in constant tension with Muslims, intellectually as well as politically and in the most basic tenets of faith in God. Thomas Aquinas was hardly alone in dedicating considerable time to his Contra Gentiles, a set of arguments for an intellectual outlook fully consistent with orthodox, catholic Christianity as opposed to the intellectual traditions forged from ancient philosophy within the culture of the early centuries of Islam.
Yet by the thirteenth century, things were already changing. The Crusades marked the beginning of the military counterattack by Christendom against Muslim states, as uneven as that would be. Although the Turks remained dangerous foes into the seventeenth century, and came close in the sixteenth to wreaking tremendous havoc in the Mediterranean, they were no longer serious intellectual rivals of Italians, Spaniards, and Northern Europeans.
Precisely because there were no longer perceived to be serious intellectual rivals to European, Christian thinkers, I would propose that various ridiculous ideas reached the height of fashionability, and have left distorted schools of Christian thought in their wake down to the present. They did not start in the sixteenth or even fifteenth century, nor did they completely rule the scene even in that period, but they flourished and bore the largest share of their bad fruit then. I mean ideas like:
I am certainly a Roman Catholic, and I look with horror back at many of the doctrines of the first Protestants, but it is most assuredly true that many Catholics at the time followed them or even led them down these very paths. I think that other Catholics felt driven to express themselves in similar language or else risk losing their audience.
In the centuries since, members of these same Christian societies began to be so scandalized by these ideas that they rebelled against Christianity--really, the distorted version of it where these ideas are so prominent, but in their minds, that was all Christianity was.
The Post Christian meditations address the larger question, "Why do people believe science and the Catholic, Christian faith are mutually contradictory?" by considering the background reasons why people in the modern West desire to punish the faith of their ancestors and deny it credibility, apart from any cogent reasons to reject its actual dogmas and teachings.
Episode 037 - Jill Pasteris: Christian scientist
Bonus Episode - Nicolaus Steno
Episode 036 - Anne Hofmeister on Galactic Rotation, Math, and Glass
Episode 035 - Anne Hofmeister Shakes Up Earth Science
Episode 034 - Stephen Barr on Why to Be a Religious (and Catholic) Scientist
Episode 033 - Stephen Barr on Lemaitre-Hubble Law and the Society of Catholic Scientists
Episode 032 - Science and Saints
Request for Feedback
Episode 031 - Br. Guy Consolmagno: Teaching Science and Human Nature
Episode 030 - Br. Guy Consolmagno: Galileo and Carl Sagan
Episode 029 - Geological Awe
Episode 028 - Absolute Geologic Dating
Episode 027 - Relative Geologic Dating
Episode 026 - The Rejection of Young Earth Creationism in the 19th Century
Episode 025 - Geology after Steno: Catastrophism, Uniformitarianism, and Fideism
Episode 024 - Geology after Steno: Diluvialism, Neptunism, and Vulcanism
Episode 023 - Clericalism, Sex Abuse, Addiction, and Hope
Episode 022 - Nicolaus Steno (Niels Stensen) - The Protogeologist
Episode 021 - Hypocrisy and Geology: Battlegrounds Between Faith and Science
Episode 020 - Bill and Father Spitzer Talk Intellectual Culture and Education
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